NASA's New 'Gamma' Constellations Are Partly Made From Black Holes (And The TARDIS)

You'd think with all the astronomical discoveries we've made over the years, we'd have plenty of stars to make new constellations from. Like, thousands of them. And in a way, we do. But why use boring old stars, when you can use black holes instead?

Rather than using animals or gods to demarcate the constellations, NASA's drawing from modern pop culture instead. For example, here's the TARDIS of Doctor Who fame.

Image: NASA

And the USS Enterprise because, well, how could you not make up new constellations and not involve Star Trek somehow?

Image: NASA

Now, not all the GRBs are from black holes — specifically, super-massive ones at the centre of other galaxies — as NASA explains:

The individual points of gamma-ray light in Fermi constellations usually aren't stars. About half of them are distant galaxies powered by monster black holes. These objects, called blazars, produce gamma-ray jets that happen to point in our direction.

Even more fascinating is that around 30 per cent of detections are "not recognised at any other wavelength", which basically means we have no idea what they are:

An exciting possibility is that some of these unknown sources may contain new types of gamma-ray-emitting objects. Fermi has provided our best look yet at the gamma-ray sky, but its mission continues to delve deeper into the extreme cosmos.